


the ash made it hard to breathe

by fiveyaaas



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Blood and Violence, F/M, Gore, Heavy Angst, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Other characters mentioned - Freeform, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Suicidal Thoughts, or being manipulated by mind control/substances, set after s2, the idea is five is either having nightmares
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-14
Updated: 2020-09-14
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:47:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,019
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26464405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fiveyaaas/pseuds/fiveyaaas
Summary: There was supposed to be a light at the end of the tunnel, but Five knew whatever was controlling his thoughts was keeping him from ever finding it.
Relationships: Number Five | The Boy/Vanya Hargreeves
Comments: 4
Kudos: 45





	the ash made it hard to breathe

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Mavrick](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mavrick/gifts).



> This is for Mave, who listened to me rant in the meta channel on discord about angst a while back when I started writing this (and then neglected it because it made me sad). It’s ALSO to get the Fiveya tag to 500.

He awoke at the dining table. 

The knife he had stabbed in the table wasn’t in the table. There were six knives now, though. 

They were just sticking out of his siblings’ corpses.

He took the knife from Vanya’s neck to his throat, and he fell asleep again. 

* * *

He was walking down the hallways of the mansion. It felt like when one walked down the hallways of a motel- they felt endless, exactly the same outside but containing different bodies in each room. Something about the flooring made him think he might sink into the carpet, might drown into it. Without much thought, he opened one of the doors before he could.

A fifteen year old girl's head nearly severed off her body from the impact of a bullet. A bullet he had not thought anything of when the coldness of his chest could only be warmed by the knowledge that the next kill would be the one that would be good enough to get him home to his family. 

He would kill a hundred and forty three other people before he would get home to his family though. 

He closed the door, and he opened another. Lila Pitts’ parents hog-tied and pleaded as much as they were capable. 

He closed that door, and he opened another. The Handler laying on a bed, legs spread and a cat-like smile curving around a cigarette. 

He closed that door, and he opened another. 

The multiverse was real. He had known this fact for quite a while, considering he’d recently launched himself into one. Surely, his brain was just compensating for that information, showing to him every possible scenario. 

It didn’t change the way he felt about it. 

He opened the door, a door to another dimension. 

He saw a ten-year-old with a rictus, wild grin, shoot Vanya. Five didn’t know if he was staring at him when he said it, but heard him say he didn’t care for her anyways. 

Five couldn’t close the door, couldn’t do anything besides sink to the ground.

Another door opened as the one to the other universe closed. It was of another timeline, but this one was familiar. He had never even seen Vanya interact with Leonard, but he watched in horror as she sat in his lap, right on the couch cushion he’d taken note of a particular stain when he’d searched Leonard’s place.

“Vanya,” he screamed. “Vanya, get away.” 

She laughed at something Leonard said, telling him conspiratorially, the way she did when she’d confide in Five and tell her some of the bullshit the others had put her through, “Oh, Five? I never really liked him.” 

He let the carpet pull him down and suffocate him. 

* * *

The White Violin looked to Five, and, without conscious thought of his actions, he walked towards her, seeing only the body of his best friend. 

When he got to her, he saw she was holding the literal body of his best friend, face blue and marks on her neck from being strangled. 

The White Violin smiled at him cruelly. 

“You’re next,” she said, dropping Vanya’s limp body to her feet. 

He didn’t mind being killed then anyways. 

* * *

He sat in a room of oil portraits. Each of them depicted a different significant moment in his life. 

The first was the time after Vanya, named Seven at the time, had recovered from her then supposed illness. She still walked around weakly, and Five had wondered how it felt to be ordinary like her. He stopped playing with Three, who had gotten more and more annoying after her powers had manifested, teleporting to Seven and asking, “Do you feel any better?” 

The second was the first time Ben had killed something- just an animal, that time. Ben had avoided looking at anyone, choosing to stay in the blood the rest of the day as some sort of self-inflicted punishment.

The third was the time he’d found Klaus in the mausoleum, eyes red. 

The fourth was the day he and his family had been introduced as the inaugural class of the Umbrella Academy. 

The fifth was the day he stabbed the knife into the table and left his family behind. 

The sixth was moments after he found their bodies. 

The seventh was more hopeful. Delores’s face felt like a reprieve in that instant, having seen Vanya’s charred body or any of the deaths he’d seen before. The only problem was, seeing it from a third person perspective, rather than being near her, made him unsettled in a way he couldn’t entirely describe. He didn’t want to describe it, either.

On an on, the portraits depicted the apocalypse and the Commission after. By the time he’d gotten to the end of the wall, expecting decay or death, he sucked in a harsh breath. 

The night of Icarus, for just a few seconds of time, he didn’t know if Vanya was alive or dead. He’d come to kill her, he should have felt grateful to Allison, but he could only feel hollowness, could only breathe in and smell the ash coating his lungs. It had gone away, once he’d had a mission, to take them away from there, but, in that moment, he contemplated why the world ending hurt less than thinking she was dead. 

* * *

There was supposed to be a light at the end of the tunnel, but Five knew whatever was controlling his thoughts was keeping him from ever finding it. 

He didn’t know when he’d wake up, didn’t know if he had found the gates of purgatory or hell, didn’t know if this would be the punishment for every crime he’d committed. 

For a second, just an instant, he saw Vanya safe and happy with him. She lay in his arms and he told her that he loved her, not knowing when she’d leave him and not capable of being cowardly in that instant due to the time constraints. She’d smiled at him, lips meeting his. 

But then he was tasting ash instead of strawberry chapstick, and the images in his mind started flitting through his mind again. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! I’ll post something happier eventually 😔


End file.
